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How Santa Fe shooting victim’s tragic death is bringing her family an unexpected ‘blessing’

May 23, 2018

(SANTA FE, Texas) — Cynthia Tisdale, an art room teacher’s aide and loving wife and mother, was among the 10 students and staff gunned down inside Santa Fe High School in Texas on Friday. As her loved ones mourn the shocking loss, her high-profile death has provided one blessing for the family.

Tisdale’s husband, William Tisdale, has idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a fatal lung disease, according to their son, William Recie Tisdale, who goes by Recie.

On March 29, the family started a GoFundMe page to raise money for stem cell treatment. They set an initial goal of $13,000, but the money was only trickling in. Prior to the Santa Fe shooting, the campaign had raised $1,215, GoFundMe spokesperson Kate Cichy told ABC News.

Now, in the days since Cynthia Tisdale’s highly publicized death, the GoFundMe page has raised over $112,000, with donations from all 50 states and 33 countries, Cichy said.

“We have been blessed,” Recie Tisdale told ABC News via text Tuesday. “And I would prefer any more outpouring be given to Santa Fe High School for all the victims.”

Recie Tisdale said his father’s “GoFundMe page was done prior to this tragedy and we are now blessed we can get stem cell, maybe lung transplant,” and still have extra funds to help him with home health care.

“Our mother’s main priority was to make sure our father was taken care of and now he gets to have his stem cell treatment and the true blessing is now he has a chance at long-term health care,” the Tisdale family wrote on the GoFundMe page Monday night. “We feel all the support and thank you all so much.”